MONROE — In a news release last week, the state Department of Corrections announced that some of its prisons had earned environmental awards from a fellow agency, the state Department of Ecology, for handling inmate sewage.
Four Department of Corrections wastewater treatment plants had received Outstanding Performance Awards “for perfect performance in 2014,” the release stated. The awards were important, the announcement added, “because wastewater treatment plant operations are the first line of defense to protect public health and water quality.”
Indeed. And the Department of Corrections need look no further than its prison at Monroe as a prime example of how to fail at providing that protection.
The 2,400-inmate Monroe Corrections Complex was not one of the four winners of the human waste awards and was not mentioned in the Department of Corrections media release.
But just a day earlier, the Monroe complex got a big mention in Prison Legal News, the national monthly based in Florida and edited by former Washington inmate Paul Wright.
I wrote the piece based on hundreds of prison and Ecology Department documents obtained by Prison Legal News and its non-profit owner, the Human Rights Defense Center — which agreed to also share the documents with Seattle Weekly.
The records reveal that roughly half a million gallons of sewage water and other contaminates have been negligently dumped or accidentally spilled from the Monroe prison’s wastewater system over the past eight years, polluting local rivers and wetlands.
The Ecology Department has no clear assessment of the damage and admits it has dealt lightly with Department of Corrections violations compared to private polluters. Yet the systemic breakdowns and human negligence have at times badly polluted the pristine Skykomish River, whose icy headwaters collect in the Cascades. A nearly 400,000-gallon spill in 2012, caused by an effluent pump failure, went undiscovered by the prison for almost four days while nobody was minding the wastewater helm.
Most importantly, the Monroe prison’s aging waste lagoons, where human sewage is pre-treated before being pumped into the City of Monroe’s wastewater treatment plant, are a disaster waiting to happen. In 2012, according to a report from a Department of Ecology inspector, a dike separating the sewage lagoons from the Skykomish River was at risk of failure and “could potentially release millions of gallons of untreated wastewater” into the river environment.
When I asked the Department of Ecology for an update recently, spokesman Larry Altose confirmed that “these concerns continue,” adding that the state was seeking legislative funding for a lagoon-replacement project that would address them.
Ecology referred me to a 10-year-old inspection report that placed the threat of a lagoon-busting waste deluge at a lower level. Yet the 2003 report states the inspection was only superficial and even at that, “erosion has likely created an almost vertical cut along the upstream slope and reservoir rim,” posing risk of a massive spill.
I also discovered a separate 2012 Department of Ecology PowerPoint presentation discussing a lagoon replacement.
“Pretreatment lagoon dikes determined to be unsafe by Dam Safety” inspectors, it says without dispute.
The Department of Ecology has recorded the spills and in some cases levied fines. But in recent years, ecology appeared reluctant to come down too hard on its fellow agency. As a Department of Ecology bio-solids specialist wrote in a 2012 email to other department officials, “I was told it wouldn’t look good for a state agency to enforce on another state agency. Really? I think it makes us look pretty bad when we overlook the environmental issues for them and enforce on others.”
Also among the state documents is a 2013 letter to ecology from a Monroe prisoner who worked at the wastewater operation. Jonathan Jones-Thomas wrote that he “was thrown in the hole for asking too many questions about the wastewater treatment plant here on the Monroe compound.”
Ecology and corrections were separately asked to respond, and – “tellingly,” as Prison Legal News editor Wright puts it — they chose to do so in a joint statement authored by Department of Ecology spokesperson Altos and Department of Corrections spokesperson Susan Biller.
Has ecology been soft on the Department of Corrections’s violations? Yes, the spokespersons admitted, allowing that it’s done purposely. “Repeated discharges from the same facility would ordinarily prompt ecology to consider a penalty, a step ecology has taken with state and public agencies in other situations,” they said.
“However, Department of Corrections’ corrective plan, if funded, would comprehensively address and eliminate the repeated failures at the facility. Because of this, and the caliber of MCC’s reporting and response, ecology finds no value in a penalty, which is normally issued to compel attention and action.”
The Department of Corrections has had a wastewater lagoon replacement project at the bid-ready stage since 2010, they said.
The plan for a new Fluent Exit Facility building that would send all prison waste directly to the city treatment plant would cost an estimated $5.9 million.
But during the recently completed legislative session in Olympia, as in the past four years, lawmakers chose to not fund the new facility.
Rick Anderson (randerson@seattleweekly.com) writes about sex, crime, money and politics at Seattle Weekly. His latest book is “Floating Feet: Irregular Dispatches from the Emerald City.”
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